The present invention relates to an energy recovery system and particularly one in which the heat from a heated liquid from a process is recovered by a temperature controlled heat exchanger.
With the ever-increasing cost of energy in recent years, it is desired to recover heat normally generated by manufacturing processes and which previously had been lost by cooling through external cooling towers or the like. There exists a variety of systems, as represented for example, by U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,500,655; 3,827,343; 3,926,249 and 4,142,575 which disclose heat recovery systems for commercial application in which either manually or temperature actuated dampers are employed to control air flow in mixing chambers or heat exchangers to add recovered heat to a building when heat is required or discharge it from the building when no heat recovery is desired.
Such systems, although providing heat recovery under certain conditions, are inefficient in that large volumes of air are moved constantly without regard to the temperature conditions of the system, and simple mixing or rerouting of the air flow is employed to provide the discharge of recovered heat into a building or external to the building as conditions require. Such systems are inherently inefficient due to the utilization of the electrical energy required to drive the blower systems employed.